If nothing changes…
An end-of-year reflection on a useful and motivating quotation.
Please permit me to be a little bit philosophical as the year draws to a close.
Because most people are on holidays at this time it’s a valuable opportunity to reflect. Often in the busy day to day activity of dentistry we put our heads down and work, pretty much on auto-pilot.
Now with a few days of peace we can decide what changes need to be made. This leads on to perhaps my all time favourite quotation.
This quote is often attributed to Albert Einstein but there is no evidence that he ever said it.
"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results"
Whenever I was frustrated with how my practice was going this quote motivated me to make the necessary changes.
The biggest example in my career was the decision I made to not have children in my practice and focus entirely on adult restorative dentistry.
80% of the time I found treating children to be OK but 20% of the time a misbehaving child would make me regret my decision to ever become a dentist.
Nothing I did ever fixed the problem.
Then one day I thought: “Let’s stop treating children and just focus on adults.” People told me I’d go broke but in fact the practice absolutely thrived, and I felt a lot better.
So often, in my consulting career, I’ve visited practices and found the owner frustrated with something or other.
Maybe it has to do with staff, or equipment, or the type of patients, or the mix of services, or the fees, or the profitability, or the hours, or the stress level.
Quite often potential solutions are easy to find.
The issue is that instead of trying something different the dentist keeps doing the same thing and hoping that somehow, magically the problem will disappear.
It won’t.
So my suggestion is to use this time of year to think deeply about what makes you happy at work and what makes you sad at work.
Then make changes to increase the happy and decrease the sad.
And, if the changes don’t work try something else. You can fix pretty much any problem if you are prepared to be bold and make changes.
The one thing that is certain is that if you keep doing the same things, nothing will change.
